Retail merchants have long understood that careful product placement in retail stores can boost product sales. Merchants, in selecting where products are displayed in their stores, commonly leverage the product associations that occur in the minds of typical consumers. By placing complementary products near each other, merchants passively suggest purchases that the customers might not otherwise be inclined to make. For example, soft drinks and cheese dips are commonly consumed with potato and tortilla chips. Knowing this, merchants frequently place all of these items very close to each other so that consumers who plan to buy one must pass by, and often will decide to purchase, the others.
Merchants historically have had to rely on instinct, common sense, and manual review of sales data to assess the impact of product placement on sales. Merchants have had little help from the information-technology industry in making product-placement decisions.
An inventory-management system includes data-collection terminals that acquire product-identification data identifying products placed on store shelves, product-placement data identifying the locations of the products in the store, and sales data providing information about sales of the products. The system also includes a database that receives and stores the product-identification, product-placement, and product sales data collected by the terminals. A database-query component queries the database to identify relationships between product sales and product placement.